How to Virtualize PLM?

Virtualization becomes an important piece of modern technological solutions. The time of physical servers is over. Businesses are actively seeking how to optimize the IT and backend deployment. As part of these activities, businesses are starting to rely on the ability to virtualize enterprise servers into scalable physical server machines. Another aspect of virtualization are actually coming from the side of “cloud based technologies”. Companies like Amazon and Racksapce are focusing on how to provide expandable (elastic) cloud based solution. Good examples here are Amazon EC2 or Rackspace Cloud. However, does it really as simple as it sounds?

I read few articles related to the topic of SQL Server and virtualization. In 2011 SQL Server Market Trending toward cloud virtualization and Are SQL Server BI systems compatible with virtualization? There are some interesting and controversial points made by these articles. Microsoft is trying to play with SQL Azure version to drive their cloud business forward. At the same time, SQL BI tools can provide some important business value propositions for customers to buy them. However, multiple front-end and back-end tools provided by Microsoft, in my view, can introduce some portfolio and end-user acceptance problem. Another part of conversation was about technologies and solution architecture for SQL Server, BI and cloud. The resource sharing which made possible by leveraging virtualization may have some limitation when it comes to SQL, BI and similar application.

These two articles made me think about what will be the next technological steps PLM companies will be taking. PDM/PLM business spent last 15-20 years working on databases. The fundamental PLM believes in database singularity and establishment of a “single point of truth” will face a future challenge with growing introduction of cloud, virtualization and distributed technologies. It will be interesting to see what path PLM companies will be taking in order to move their solutions to cloud? Dassault is making sound statements about Enovia V6 cloud compatibility. Aras (enterprise open source PLM) just announced their cloud availability. In my view, Windchill and Teamcenters are not playing a strong game in building of cloud future and more focused on how to solve enterprise data challenges. I can see them investing in the future “private cloud” technologies and trying to virtualize their current solutions.

What is my conclusion? Virtualization is the name of the future technological change. To build efficient and scalable solutions that can be virtualized to the big enterprise data scale is a future challenge for PLM businesses. I’d like to learn more about how PLM SQL backbones will be transformed and virtualized using future cloud technologies.

An interesting post was published by Luna-Tech research about the Business Process Management redefinition. Only few years ago, PLM was very focused about Collaborative Business Processes. These days I see PLM and Business Processes are not going very often together. My take is that PLM learned BPM implementation lessons. It…

A very interesting video presenting how you can track hand motion in the virtual 3D Model. The demo prepared by Robert Y. Wang and Jovan Popović. We demonstrate real-time tracking of the 3-D pose and configuration of the hand for gestural user-input and desktop virtual reality. The only components of our system…